First off I should say that my computer had some technical issues running this game. I'm not really sure why, I can run much more graphically intensive games much better, but I don't really let this fault my experience with Firewatch. I made due with what I could, got used to it, and stopped noticing it altogether a little bit in the game. Not the dev's fault at all.

I think I want to say that I liked most of Firewatch. Hell, certain parts of Firewatch were some of the most entertaining times I've had playing videogames in recent memory. But, looking back on it now, I think some of my excitement and enjoyment was exacerbated by my hype levels still being so gigantic whilst playing through the game.

The first main chunk of the game is the scenario I've witnessed over and over and over - confronting the teens at the lake. I pretty much knew what to expect the first day, so I took my time and explored a bit, much more than I normally would. The world of Firewatch is really beautiful - the artstyle is unlike any I've really ever seen. It's slightly cartoonish, like a Team Fortress 2 or Portal kind of cartoonish, but the scenery and wildlife is lush with colors and gorgeous viewpoints.

On the way to the lake, I loved the interactions with Delilah and the environment. The characters are wonderfully voice acted and it seems like two actual human beings in the real world, not actors reading from a script. Reporting everything to her at the campsite and hearing her reactions was gold. It hit me pretty early on that a lot of the conversations I had with Delilah would be changed depending on my actions and my talking topics. It made me think a little more carefully when talking about things.

The first act - just kind of doing forest ranger-y stuff - was awesome. I want more of that in Firewatch. But the second act of Firewatch - when they realize they're being listened to and possibly observed - was amazing. I'd never been so engaged in the narrative of the story. Delilah's voice actor during some of these scenes made everything much more believable and horrifying. I started noticing sounds in the wilderness more, like someone was following me. It honestly made me pretty paranoid and gave me huge adrenaline rushes at points. Discovering the notes of Delilah and Henry's conversations was an insane feeling and discovering what was at Wapiti Station was one of the biggest "Oh my God, this is crazy" feelings I've ever had in a videogame.

Now, I've heard this game mentioned as similar to Gone Home - I've never played Gone Home but I knew enough about it to kind of expect a certain vibe with this game. Starting in the beginning with the choices made and the backstory of the characters being developed, I always kept the story choices Henry took in the back of my mind and tried to keep to how I thought Henry would react with the background I had prepared for him. Throughout much of the second act, I kept this in mind. First discovering the notes someone was taking on Henry and Delilah to the printed-out reports at Wapiti Station, I always kept in the back of my head that maybe this really was Henry losing it and making it all up. There was actually a point where he tells Delilah that he might be going mad. I figured, with the huge choose-your-own-adventure-esque set-up in the beginning to establish a backstory, along with dreaming about talking to his wife Julia in the middle of the night, that maybe this all really was made up in some sort of Fight Club-ish "I'm doing all of this but I don't know that it's me" kind of thing, brought on by the guilt of leaving his sick wife. Around the time a cough was heard on the Walkie-Talkie and a tape showing up at Henry's tower with recorded dialogue of him, I also entertained the notion that maybe Henry wasn't crazy and maybe this was all some sort of social experiment by the government or some shady organization to test how susceptible people were to man-made situations that they thought were real. I started questioning a lot of stuff - did those girls really go missing? Were those girls innocent teenagers or part of this whole experiment? At Wapiti Station, the read-out suggested that Henry was prone to manipulation - was I, as the player, playing into that by just blindly heading towards objectives and not searching around more for clues? It was paranoia and it felt great to be confronted with a mystery like this in a game.

And then it just kind of stops.

The reveal just kind of happens without any real resolution or change to the characters or really to the story. There is no conspiracy, Henry and Delilah aren't going crazy, the government isn't out to put them in a weird social experiment. It's just Ned messing with them to try and protect the fact that he killed his son. Or something like that? Reflecting back on the over-arching story once the "twist" comes about makes it kind of confusing to me. If Ned was so hellbent on living like a hermit because he couldn't bear anyone finding out he was responsible for his son's death, why even mess with Henry and Delilah in the first place? Why would he literally leave a key to the cave where his son died for Henry? And then once it's all figured out, the father just kind of disappears and moves on. We find his hideout but it doesn't really offer any sort of relief or closure to anything. It's just kind of there.

I've been seeing different reactions to the ending - how it's unsatisfying because nothing really happens and just sort of wraps itself up, to how it's satisfying because nothing really happens and just sort of wraps itself up. To be completely honest, the content of the ending of Firewatch didn't really bother me that much. But reading through a lot of people's reactions, something clicked to me:

Remember how I said I would try to play Henry as close as I could to what his background story choices correlated to? After finishing the game and reading up other player's reactions - I feel like I may have played this game wrong. People on reddit and here on Giant Bomb are talking about all these things Delilah is saying to them and how Henry is reacting - by saying he's begging her to come to Boulder with him, but that she can't stay "in the shadow of a dead boy" and returns home, never to see Henry again. That's not at all how my playthrough went. Again, remembering the choices, I played Henry as faithful to his wife the entire time. I didn't engage with Delilah when she was flirting and I even put Henry's ring back on when I saw it was removed. At the end, I did kind of break down and tell Delilah to come to Colorado, and she was a little receptive to it. She didn't take him up on his offer, but she didn't completely shut Henry down either. It just sort of felt like a middle-of-the-road, "eh" conclusion to their relationship arc. It got me thinking that maybe since I didn't really follow the theme of someone running away from their past and their responsibilities and their life choices that the choices I had made made for a really lackluster overall story experience between the two main characters. Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense. I didn't feel a gut punch when the credits rolled because of a disappointing lack of a happy ending, I didn't feel a gut punch when the credits rolled because "that's how life is - a disappointment", I felt a gut punch when the credits rolled because I hadn't even clocked 4 hours into the game.

For a game with such an engaging first and second act, the wind was completely taken out of my sails by the conclusion of the third act that it almost completely soured my overall view of my experience with Firewatch - and at such a disappointingly short length, it made it all the worse. I think if Campo Santo could've squeezed in maybe 3 or 4 more hours, Firewatch might've been perfect. More suspense, more character interaction with Delilah (or anyone else), more background with Julia, more fire watching tasks, more things to do in the forest, more things to do anywhere, more things to interact with - anything. I was shaking my head, saying "There's no way that this is it. There still has to be a twist," as I was boarding the helicopter at the end of the game. But that was it. All the excitement and paranoia and general unnerving creepiness turned out to be nothing. The fun I had of reprimanding misbehaving campers in a number of ways only came up once and I never got to do it again. People can say, "Well Firewatch is like life that way - you don't always get what you want and it's disappointing," but that's a bit of a cop out in my opinion. I also reject the notion that "this is how real people are so that's how this game will end up." I don't think Ned acts at all like a real person. I feel like he's just there to usher the story along at convenient points. Like he's making the story a mystery just for the sake of the story having a mystery. I don't think anyone would balk at the thought of more Firewatch, especially considering how good certain aspects of the game are, it's just that what I experienced, the way I played it, was massively disappointing as soon as I finished it.